Is Hyperchip Hype?

Peter Galbraith writes "There was an interview on CBC (here in Canada) last evening about Hyperchip, a Montreal-based company that are working on a new type of router that would scale up 1000 times in traffic (so wouldn't be obsolete in less than a year) and would pass packets to their destination in a few hops instead of a dozen or more. Any experts out there think it's hype? Or real?" The explanation on Hyperchip's "technology" page is pretty thin, but considering they just raised $70 million, I hope they've given more convincing details to their investors.

Comments

Hopcount != Speed

[cwsnate]

Simple hop count does translate directly into speed. A two hop route plagued with slow nodes might be (and often is) slower than a route that consists of more hops with faster nodes. Sounds like ignorant marketing hype.

Moore's Law

[Apreche]

Look at the graph on the company's white papers. Optical vs. Moore's law. First of all you really can't compare a law and optical. Second of all, they have moores law wrong.

Lucent used to have a router that sounds like this

[thogard]

But the never found any customers. It turns out that the few people that need very high speed routing don't buy anything but cisco and in that market it won't matter if you have a product thats much better, you'll have poor sales for years before the market will even consider your product.

As far as routing much faster, its not that hard to do. If you stop treating a router as a router and more like a switch, you can speed things up a grat deal with content addressable memory (the stuff used for cache tags). Its very expensive but 8 mb of CAM ram will let you decide which of 16 interfaces a packet goes to within 500 ps after the address bits hit the hardware. You can't do real time route update on this type of system like a cisco but you can still change routes within miliseconds.

The ideas behind the internet are dead when a small business can't dual home. Without routable class C address, that has already happened.